This Little Place Here: Random Evening Pictures

Days have been pretty full lately at this little place here. It's that time of year when the sun is up for hours after dinner, and we spend most of our evenings outside. There is so much to do, what with planting the garden, weeding the garden, watering the garden, weeding the flower beds, mowing the lawn. And that's just the ordinary late-spring stuff; on top of that we have all the getting ready for DD1's graduation open house items to do--things like emptying the garage and giving it a good scrub/sweep in preparation for setting up the tables and chairs for her party. Invitations have all gone out in the mail, now we need to be ready to seat 60+ people at any one time during the three hours of her open house. But cleaning the garage is a task for next week; this week is all about getting the garden fully planted.

I've been in the garden until either sunset or until I can no longer stand being attacked by the hundreds of little vampires--aka mosquitoes--that have appeared this week; coming out right around eight p.m. Last night I actually had the camera with me in the garden because the day before I'd spotted a new pair of birds, bobolinks, and wanted to get pictures of them should they show up again. I did manage to get a couple pictures, mostly blurry, and then made use of the camera on my way through the evening rounds of shutting in chickens, etc, before retiring to the house for the rest of the night.

bobolink singing on a fence post

turned away from the camera, showing his markings

Bobolinks sound very similar to red winged blackbirds, and are about the same size, but as you can see, they do not have the same coloring. I'd never seen one before, or at least, not in it's fancy mating plumage, and had to go look it up in my bird book. Apparently they are cousins to blackbirds.

Blackberry blossoms

The blackberry canes out by the garden are all in bloom right now. They showed up three years ago as volunteers (no doubt seeds sown by the local birds), and I now cultivate them into a fairly neat row next to part of the south end of the garden. I haven't yet been back to the woods to see if the thousands of blackberry canes back there are blooming yet. I'm guessing not quite, as it is cooler and shadier in the woods, usually putting the plants a week or two behind what is in the sunny fields.

white and purple mid-height iris

tall white iris

My iris are blooming right now too. I have probably over a thousand iris, of three different varieties. Unfortunately, I don't know what any of them are! All were given to me free-for-the-digging; by friends, former neighbors, and by my Mom.

By this time in the evening, it was well past 9:00, and the sun was quite low in the western sky. Time to shut the chickens in before going to the house where DD1's graduation gown awaited my iron; today is her last day of school and it is customary for seniors to wear their gowns to class on their final day. The last half hour of their high school careers will be spent on Senior Walk, where the graduating class, in caps and gowns, parades through the high school, middle school, and elementary school--all are housed in one rambling interconnected building in our little school district.